• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Ah! This is a shell pipe! It’s composing several smaller commands together, cool stuff.

    • ls -1 is the grep-friendly version of ls, it prints one entry per line, like a shopping list.

    • head takes a set number of entries from the head of a list, in this case 2 items. negative two, meaning “all but the last two.”

    • xargs takes the incoming pipe and converts it into extra arguments, in this case applying those arguments to rm.

    So, combined, this says “list all the .dump files, pick the first two, all but the last two, and delete them.” Presumably the first are the oldest ones and the last are the newest, if the .dump files are named chronologically.






  • Ironically enough, it’s led to me playing more games on the living room television! The steam deck helped me adapt to playing with a gamepad, as opposed to mouse and keyboard.

    Until they come out with a Steam Controller 2, I will say the best gamepad for steam is the Dualsense (a Dualshock 4 also works). It’s got one touchpad instead of two, but Steam lets you map the left and right half separately, which covers my primary use cases. I also installed the RISE4 remap kit, a hardware mod that adds paddles on the back of the controller which can mimic any face button. Not as good as having actual new buttons, but it does mean I can run and jump without taking my thumb off the right stick.


  • Like many open source games, it has that distinctly ‘alpha’ feel to it right now, but I do enjoy NodeCore on occasion. It’s a zen minimalist block game with a unique diagetic crafting system. Instead of a traditional “recipe book” or “crafting grid”, you produce new materials through in-world transformations. For instance, to make glass, you have to surround sand with fire, and to control fire, you basically want to build a deliberately-shaped dirt or stone pit… the whole thing feels a little like minecraft and a little like a sand physics sim or cellular automata.



  • same here! I’m a huge fan of MessagEase, a keyboard specifically made for the cell phone touch screen form factor. I think Valve used to dabble in something like this for the controller form factor, the ‘daisy’ or whatever? I think that should absolutely make a comeback, typing with touchpads is a short-term solution but with all the buttons and analogs on a modern controller, we should really have more keyboard options! Maybe something like each stick has 8 positions, and holding any combo of left-stick + right-stick gives one of 64 virtual ‘keys’, which you can click with the triggers, and the bumpers let you swap between different alphabets.